Pay telephones are common in the prior art. With the recent advent of multimedia, it is desirable to vend multimedia services at a multimedia apparatus, much in a similar way to the way in the which public pay phone services are provided.
Public delivery of multimedia services such as electronic mail, Internet browsing and wayfinding have been attempted to date by placing a personal computer in a secure box. This approach has largely failed due to users being intimidated by personal computers, poor reliability of personal computers, the lack of useful services typically found on personal computers and the large effort required to maintain such computers.